Hollywood actor FOREST WHITAKER won an Oscar for his portrayal of former Ugandan president Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, released in 2006. Whitaker has since been involved in charity work in northern Uganda and South Sudan and was recently in Kampala.
Last week, Whitaker was interviewed on the BBC’s Hard Talk programme, where he talked about the challenge of playing Idi Amin. Jonathan Kamoga transcribed excerpts from the Interview.
You won numerous awards including an Oscar for your portrayal of Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator, in The Last King of Scotland; is that a film you would be proud of?
Yes. I gained a lot from that film as an artiste and as a person. I had to do so much research to try and understand this particular character. I had never been to the African continent at that point. That was an opening for me and I had been charged with the notion that I was from there.
So, I needed to understand how it felt like for someone to actually be African and not African-American. And that was a challenge, the challenge of understanding the historical role of things that were going on during that time and all the countries in that region.
I had to learn the language, I was working on Kiswahili, So I could speak [it] in the film and be able to improvise a little bit. [I had] to learn his musical instruments, because there was one of those things, the accordion, that he was playing; it allowed him to create a party wherever he went. There were certain qualities of his personality that were interesting.
You had to put on 50 pounds to take a role like that; you must have been eating a lot in the run up to that.
Yeah, and during that time; I just kept eating.
So, as an African-American going to the continent of Africa for the first time, what did you feel? Did you feel a sense that you have come home?
Of course I acquired a deeper feeling about that, the more I was opening myself to understanding things. At first, you get a general feeling of the air, the place, the people, the generosity. Ugandans were very generous to me, you know.
But then something happens as you start to eat the food, you rest by the sides of the road, riding motorcycles through the streets. I tried to experience as much as I could to help me understand how to project this in a truthful way.
You were quoted in the New Yorker magazine in 2006, saying Idi Amin was responsible for major atrocities but he also reshaped opportunities for people in his country. Sounds like you perhaps somewhat admired him?
I didn’t admire the atrocities that he did as far as the many deaths, although if you examine the historical references, you still see that persons behind him committed more murders and persons before him committed more murders. It doesn’t make his right but it is just, why he was so focused on during that time.
Certainly he was trying to bring this nationalism. He kicked out the West, which is unusual for someone who came from the African continent. It is not a question of trying to act like he is some sort of a hero; it is a question of looking at the reference and seeing the different things affecting the people and changing the sense of identity. And he did have some sort of influence on changing identity.
You said in general about empathizing with characters, that once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how could you not find sympathy? Does that apply to somebody like Idi Amin who, as you say, committed many atrocities?
In some ways, I can see very strongly because at first you look at what is projected of him and you have to try and go to the source of what would make him become that. What would make him commit 300,000 murders? What would allow him to do some of the atrocities that…?
You are asking for understanding for someone who was a brutal dictator….
I’m not asking for understanding for him. I’m looking for humanity in who he is. I think we have to look at humanity; we have to be able to stand in each other’s shoes and understand that the way we behave is based on the different structures of things that happen to us as we grow up in our lives.
The perception that that film raised about Africa; one British writer and film critic, Vanessa Walters, wrote in The Guardian that the fact that Amin killed many of his people, does that give cut blanche film makers to play to some of the worst stereotypes of corrupt, murderous incompetent and ridiculous black leaders?
I think the continent is really diverse; it has all these all different types of stories and many of these stories need to be told. You know from different ways of lives, different types of characters who make up their continent.
But I think that if you look at a story and feel like this particular character and what he did in his life and the things that happened, then you will have to deal with the truth of what that is.
[Idi Amin] was a soldier who was seriously fighting with the Mau Maus and they took him. [It wasn’t his choice] to be president. They took him as said ‘here is an opportunity, we would like you to become president; we will use you as a puppet to [achieve our goals]’. But unfortunately for them, he chose not to take that path.
What does the film tell us about Hollywood because the story is related through the eyes of a young Scottish doctor who goes to Uganda? It has been said that studios want the assurances that film projects have the potential to have a significant white audience.
I think that has been the case in different times and it continues to be that way at certain times. We are looking at a system where 30% of the leading characters of film are people of color; but in reality 40% of our population is that.
So, there is disparity, there is a question on the economy, there is a question of why you make what film you make and sometimes, I think, the studios themselves make assumptions that in order to make a film successful, in order to make the monies that they need to make, they need to have white audience.
In 2013, you were wrongly accused of shoplifting, what does that tell us about race in America today?
It makes a statement about the nation, where we still need to go. Certainly I think a young black teenager is like 20 times more likely to be killed than his white counterpart. So, certainly we have things that we need to be working on.
You campaigned for Barrack Obama in his presidential bid and you said back in 2008 that ‘I can feel the tide of change in the country’; did it come?
There is still a tide of change, to try to act like we haven’t made progress you know as a nation, culturally is not true. We are coming from a situation where we originally came to this nation as slaves; now the [former] head of our country is President Obama. To act as if we haven’t moved anywhere is…
What is more important to you: your work as an actor or as a humanitarian activist?
My work is humanitarian work – it’s particularly important to me. I think in the corner of it, I’m always trying and striving to understand humanity and make sure that I see myself in others. And if I see myself in someone else in the struggle, in the suffering, then I would like to take up that mantle, to try and heal that.
Your peace and development initiative works a great deal with young people affected by violence in particular young people who were forced to work or fight as child soldiers as we have been seeing in Uganda as well as other parts of the world.
I don’t address that just by dealing with child soldiers; I started working initially in Uganda with child soldiers. We started working in South Sudan to deal with peace, reconciliation and development.
But the youths we have trained are activists, like a sort of an early warning system; they help each other get to safety. So that was very powerful and that’s what we did.
Developing these countries is such a huge problem; you can help the young people but where are the jobs for them even if you get them in quality education?
It must make you very frustrated that despite your huge efforts, there isn’t as much change on the ground like you would like. Yeah, certainly, I mean if you are dealing with a situation like South Sudan, where people are, you know the civil war has been going on for a long time and 50,000 deaths, thousands ….
You are dealing with over a million people who are internally displaced and you know the UN says over five million people do not have enough food…
But are we not [supposed] to try to move things forward and help the equation because of those atrocities? I am saying that what we have done is we have worked with the youth, trained them in area, those youth went out to the communities to train others in those areas and within that space. I just said it’s a really difficult situation, but we have managed to help…
Can activists like you be agents for change?
I think we all can be agents of change if we like to stand up to certain things. Certainly like others working in this area, we have thousands working in the civilian camps who we are working with 3,000 this moment, we are working in another refugee camp where we shall be working with about 10,000 people.
So certainly we are dealing with the situation, building clean health centers in the Equatorial state; so certain things are happening during this time of difficulty, during this time of really painful recognitions.